Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 28, 2003

Photo: BILL HABER

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U. S. Attorney General John gestures as he delivers an address to New Orleans-area law enforcement officers Thursday Sept. 25, 2003. , defended his push for federal prosecutors to seek the severest charges and penalties more often, saying that such a policy could actually reduce the number of cases that go to trial. (AP Photo/Bill Haber) less

U. S. Attorney General John gestures as he delivers an address to New Orleans-area law enforcement officers Thursday Sept. 25, 2003. , defended his push for federal prosecutors to seek the severest charges and ... more

2003-09-28 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.

Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals -- terrorists or otherwise. But critics of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law is evidence the administration has sold the American public a false bill of goods, using terrorism as a guise to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda.

Justice Department officials point out that they have employed their newfound powers in many instances against suspected terrorists. With the new law breaking down the wall between intelligence and criminal investigations, the Justice Department in February was able to bring terrorism-related charges against a Florida professor, for example, and it has used its expanded surveillance powers to move against several suspected terrorist cells.

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But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this month, also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism. In them, federal authorities have used their expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance, or seize millions in tainted assets.

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and electronic evidence has helped to track an unidentified fugitive and the investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets, the report said.

Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report represent only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism cases pursued under the law.

The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to press charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County, who planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise ship she was traveling on with her family in May.

The woman, who said she made the threats to try to return home to her boyfriend, was sentenced last week to two years in federal prison because of a provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism against mass transportation systems.

The law passed by Congress just five weeks after the terror attacks of Sept.

Officials with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have seen a sharp spike in investigations as a result of their expanded powers, officials said in interviews. For example, the terrorism law allows the authorities to investigate cash smuggling cases more aggressively and to seek stiffer penalties by elevating them from what had been mere reporting failures.

As a result, a senior official said investigators in the last two years had seized about $35 million at American borders in undeclared cash, checks and currency being smuggled out of the country -- a significant increase over the previous few years. While the authorities say they suspect that large amounts of the smuggled cash may have ultimately been intended to finance Middle Eastern terrorists, much of it involved drug smuggling, corporate fraud and other crimes not directly related to terrorism.

Publicly, Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior Justice Department officials have portrayed their expanded power almost exclusively as a means of fighting terrorists, with little or no mention of other criminal uses.

"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil," Ashcroft said last month in a speech in Washington, one of more than two dozen he has given in defense of the law that has come under growing attack. "We have used these tools to save innocent American lives."

Internally, however, Justice Department officials have emphasized a much broader mandate.

A guide to a Justice Department employee seminar last year on financial crimes, for instance, said: "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?"

Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, a liberal group that has been critical of Ashcroft, said the Justice Department's public assertions struck him as misleading and perhaps dishonest.

"What the Justice Department has really done," he said, "is to get things put into the law that have been on prosecutors' wish lists for years. They've used terrorism as a guise to expand law enforcement powers in areas that are totally unrelated to terrorism."